Missing the point

“How BN lost the media war”. This came out in NST prime news page 13. Zentrum Future Studies Malaysia conducted a research on 1500 respondents on their perception of trust-worthiness of different media. And obviously we have more trusting blogs than newspaper and television. That perhaps is not good news. Again, all these ‘smart’ people started to connect between this study result with how BN lost the information war with the opposition. This is exactly what I was pointing out in my previous blog on blogging that it has nothing to do with the medium people choose to trust. It is the content! They are all missing the point. The bad news here is how people take literally what is written on the blog as true. While news agency and broadcast media are governed by rules of conduct and media related regulation, blogging often comes with lots of speculation and idiosyncratic expression that have very little to do with rational reasoning and facts. We trust a website’s content not by reason sometimes. We trust because there are enough people around us that trust it. Once we have established that trust, we seldom question it anymore. That is why there are still people who are willing to paint the picture of their own version of society based on only what they’ve read in mainstream newspapers. It is not that newspapers are allowed to lie to us. They are just being selective enough not to let us see the other side of the story. We should be critical enough to think rationally about what we read, whether it is newspapers, or web content.

Is blogging really that powerful?

There are plenty of reports everywhere about how internet and blogging have changed the face of politic in Malaysia after the recent election. Everybody seems to unanimously agree that the government has underestimated the role of the internet in their election campaign. There is no doubt that internet has brought across information filtered out by mainstream media to a more progressive bunch of Malaysian citizen. But I believe that whether the government did utilise the internet for their campaigning or not is not the question here. It is the content that matters. There is no shortage of the ruling government’s virtuous images crowding the mainstream media from newspapers to television during the campaign period. We are just numbed by those images that they repelled most of us to even look at it like vampire seeing the sunlight. Even if the ruling government filled the web spaces with all the blogs and websites they want, it would not change the result. It is the content that repels the people, not the medium. For me, I just stopped buying newspaper during the campaign period because I know there is nothing intellectual to read in the newspaper anymore.